by Howard Owen
“When that boy, Valentine Chadwick the fourth, killed him, I was twelve years old. It was the end of my childhood, the end of the good part of my life. What’s followed has been the rest.”
I would tell him, if I wasn’t gagged, that he’s a respected lieutenant in the Richmond police department, that he has done well.
“When they convicted him, it felt OK, although it was more about making him feel bad than making us feel good.
“Then, they let him disappear. They found the boat, and they said he was dead, and I accepted that for a while. But the more I thought about it, the more I was sure he was alive. I’m not religious, don’t even think there is a God, but I’d dream about this guy, and he was always laughing, and I became convinced that he was out there, somewhere.
“I didn’t know where, but I swore that I’d never stop looking.”
He goes over to a beer fridge and takes out a PBR. He drains half of it in one swallow.
“The Army was good for me. Learned some shit. My only regret? I was too young for Vietnam.”
He leans closer. I can smell the beer on his breath.
“I really, really wanted to kill somebody.”
He stops for a couple of seconds, like he’s weighing his options.
“Oh, what the fuck,” he says. “In for a dime, in for a dollar. You wanted a story? OK, here’s one, Mr. Writer. Let me tell you what happened to Lester Corbett.”
Through the haze of pain, the name comes back to me. Corbett probably was the town’s most famous defense lawyer at the time. Every town’s got one—the guy who takes on the most ridiculously no-hoper cases for enough money and/or fame.
Val Chadwick probably was one of Corbett’s better paydays. He lost the case, but he won plenty after that. I still remember him with his seersucker suit and suspenders, right out of central casting.
My memory is that it was about ten years after the Chadwick trial that Corbett disappeared. David Shiflett fills me in.
“I’d been on the force two years, so it was 1981. It was twelve years after Chadwick killed my father. But I couldn’t get that asshole lawyer out of my mind—the way he tried to insinuate that my father was some kind of bully, some drunk wife-and kid-beater who got what he deserved. The way he smirked at all of us, like we were dirt.”
Shiflett says he wanted to do Val Chadwick’s father, but by then nature, in the form of a fatal heart attack, had done it for him.
“Too bad,” he says. “I had some really bad shit planned for him.”
He sits back and finishes his beer.
“One night, Corbett’s driving east out toward the airport when he sees the blue light. He pulls over and just sits there at the wheel, the way he’s supposed to.
“I doubt he ever saw my face. It was the first time I used chloroform. Useful stuff, don’t you think?”
Shiflett’s aunt had married a guy who had a trailer and a little bit of land along the James, down in Surry County. That’s where the lawyer woke up.
“Wasn’t much, just the trailer and a boat. It was two in the morning when we got there. There weren’t any cars around. Most people just used the place on weekends, to fish and play poker and piss in the woods.
“By the time I was through playing with Corbett, he was begging me to kill him. Understand, I’m not some psycho. I didn’t jerk off on him while I was cutting him up. Nothing like that. I just wanted—what do they call it?—my pound of flesh.”
Shiflett took Lester Corbett out to the boat, wrapped in the same sheet of plastic he woke up inside of “so he didn’t mess up the floor or anything.” He zipped him inside it, along with enough cinder blocks to do the trick.
“But I cut an air hole. Didn’t want old Lester to suffocate, although he probably would have bled out in another half-hour anyhow. I wanted him to have the full drowning experience.” Shiflett laughs, then gets himself another beer. He opens another one, removes the gag and pours about a third of it down my throat, then puts the gag back on. Actually, the beer tastes pretty good right now. My throat’s a little dry.
“I know how much you like your booze,” Shiflett says.
“So, I row that damn boat right out to the ship channel, where it’s deep enough. I can still hear Lester moaning a little, begging me to either kill him or not. And then I pushed him overboard. Damn near turned the boat over doing it.”
Shiflett looks at me.
“You know, so many people hated Lester Corbett’s guts that they never even got around to questioning me about it. And I suppose the crabs and catfish ate him. Never found him, anyhow.”
The air’s getting pretty thick in here. It’s hard to breathe. My heart sinks a little when I remember the chair I’m tied to is sitting on a sheet of plastic.
“Never killed anybody before that,” Shiflett says.
“It wasn’t like I was satisfied or anything, like I felt vindicated. I thought, more than once, about killing that damn bitch mother of his. But something told me to wait, that every dog has his day.
“And I had mine.”
Three years ago “almost to the day,” Shiflett was in Vermont. He was there to bring one of our local knuckleheads back. The guy had killed his wife and her boyfriend, then had stolen a car and headed north. Nobody told him he needed a passport at the Canadian border, or that they might run a license check on him.
So, Shiflett was sent to some middle-of-nowhere town to bring him back.
“While I was there, all we could get to read was the damn Boston paper. Inside, there was this story about this hotshot who was running some kind of fund that was making everybody rich.
“And it was him.”
He shows me the page he ripped from the Boston Globe three years ago. Philippe Ducharme in all his glory.
“He had a beard then, but I knew it was him. There wasn’t much doubt in my mind. Something about those little piggy eyes. Or that prissy mouth. I’m good at spotting faces, and this one had been on my mind for thirty-seven goddamn years.”
Shiflett knew a guy. They’d worked together as cops for five years. Now the guy was a private detective, and Shiflett knew he did big-time stuff, even tried to get Shiflett to work with him.
So he called.
“He did what he could,” Shiflett says, taking another draw from the PBR. “He traced him back to France, back to when he was not much older than Val Chadwick was when he killed my father.
“But then the trail went cold. He was supposed to have come over there from the States with his father and mother, but the guy couldn’t find any evidence of his family, anywhere. It was like this guy, Ducharme, sprang out of nowhere. Got a bunch of degrees, speaks at least three languages. Smart guy.”
Shiflett’s old gumshoe buddy told him that Ducharme, who lived outside Paris before he came to the States, had kept a place in the south of France, outside of Nice.
“I had kind of kept an eye on the old lady for years, but I never had any hint that her baby boy came anywhere near here.
“But she did go on fancy vacations. Never to Boston, though. But once or twice a year, she’d go to Europe. She’s a tough old bitch, traveling at her age. Traveling alone, too.”
So, when Christina Chadwick took her next big vacation, Shiflett’s detective found out what Shiflett suspected already.
She was flying to Paris, then taking another short flight to Nice.
“Cost me a damn fortune,” Shiflett says, “But it was worth it.”
He’s been dying to tell this story. Problem is, I might be dying to hear it.
He gets another beer, then looks at me.
“Tell you what,” he says. “I take that gag out, you won’t scream?”
I nod my head with as much energy as I can rally.
“ ’Cause if you do, I’m going to shoot you again, this time in the mouth. With a real gun.” He points to the Luger he has on the table beside him.
I nod that I understand. Mum is definitely the word.
It feels so good to have that
thing out of my mouth that I almost thank him.
I’m still tied up, so he feeds me some more beer.
“You got any questions, Mr. Reporter?”
I croak out a “no.” He’s doing just fine.
He waits, then goes on.
“This French guy follows her from the airport. She has a driver. And where do you think she winds up?”
“Philippe Ducharme’s place?”
“Exactly,” Shiflett says. “You’ve been paying attention, Mr. Reporter. And when he sent the pictures back, there was the same guy I’d seen in the Boston paper, with his lovely wife and daughter.”
“Why didn’t you just turn him in when he got back?”
“I could have,” Shiflett says, scratching his neck. “It probably would’ve worked. But there were two things: One, I didn’t trust a rich guy in Massachusetts with the kind of lawyers rich guys can buy. There’s plenty of Lester Corbetts up there.
“Two, I think I just wanted it to last. It was like I’d been drooling about a big, fat tenderloin steak for thirty-seven years, and I didn’t want to eat the damn thing right away. Wanted to savor it, you know? Just knowing I had the power to ruin him was almost worth the wait.”
The detective was on retainer. Shiflett paid him to keep an eye on Philippe Ducharme and his family.
“Then, in the spring, I found out that the daughter was coming to VCU for college.”
He did his own detective work when Isabel got to Richmond, and he knew that she had paid at least three visits to the big house in Windsor Farms, staying overnight each time.
“So I waited,” he says. “I have a lot of patience, Willie. I tailed her several times. She never suspected a thing. Then, that night, it all fell into place. She wasn’t all that drunk, but I think she had the impression that if she didn’t let me drive her back to her dorm, she’d be arrested. I told her that we’d forget the underage drinking stuff, that I just wanted to make sure she got back OK.
“And she got in. You know all about chloroform, don’t you, Mr. Detective?”
“But . . .” I say, then hesitate, then say it anyhow. “She didn’t do anything. She was innocent.”
If I expect Shiflett to show or express any regret, I’m disappointed.
He shrugs.
“Collateral damage,” he says. “A means to an end. See, I realized finally that this was how I could come the closest to getting the ol’ pound of flesh. Kill him? Big deal. He’s dead. Feels nothing. His mother? Jesus, she’s got one foot in the grave anyhow. Wife? I dunno. He could get another one.
“But the daughter. His only child. Now, that’s gotta hurt. To get your only child’s head delivered to you in a box. Wouldn’t that hurt, Mr. Detective?”
The hairs are standing up on my arms.
“Oh, she didn’t feel any pain. She was out cold when I strangled her, out at the landing. She gurgled a little, and then she was gone. The hardest part? Cutting her fuckin’ head off afterward. Even with a big, sharp knife, that takes awhile.
“And, you’ve got to admit, she was a little bit guilty. I mean, she knew who her grandmother was, right? She knew something.”
“Not guilty enough to have her head cut off,” I manage to croak out.
Shiflett shrugs again.
“Whatever. They won’t find the knife, by the way. They got about as much of a chance of finding Lester Corbett.”
My curiosity overriding my pain, I ask him about the head.
“How’d I get it to Boston without getting caught? Well, I’d been thinking about this, almost since I knew she was coming here to school.”
He’d dated a woman for a year or so “until she started giving me shit about getting married. Why buy when you’re living rentfree already, right?”
She worked at a doctor’s office, and a couple of times they’d gone there after hours, to screw in one of the examination rooms.
“She was a little hostile toward her job.”
Sometime in August, he’d reconnected with her, at least long enough to sneak her office key out of her purse and have a copy made.
“I’d seen her do it,” Shiflett says. “She’d have to send stuff by UPS, medical shit. All you had to do was log on to this site, tell ’em where it was going and how much it weighed, print out a label, slap it on and put it in the pile.
“There was always lots of stuff going out. Nobody would have known they’d paid for shipping a human head to Boston, if the cops hadn’t traced it back.”
He laughs, for the first time I can recall.
The police—present company excepted—had tried to figure that one out. They knew the box had been picked up at a medical clinic in Richmond, but they’d never been able to figure out how Martin Fell was connected to all that. No one at the clinic seemed to have any knowledge of Martin Fell, nor he of them. He must have managed to slip in through a back door, jimmy the lock or something, they figured.
“In the middle of the night like that, it was the easiest thing in the world. No surveillance cameras or anything. Maybe they would have tumbled onto my connection with the receptionist if Fell hadn’t fallen into our laps. Probably not, though.”
Shiflett hadn’t counted on Fell. When it became known that Isabel Ducharme was dating some guy in his thirties who had a thing for much younger women, and that they’d had a fight that night, conclusions were reached very quickly.
“They were sure they had the right guy, right from the start,” he says. “I just helped them along. They knew I’d always been good at the interrogation part. And I’d been there, from Day One. I made sure, as soon as we got word, that I was out there.
“Maybe you think that’s crazy, being right at the scene and all, but, fuck, I just wanted to see how it all went. Even talked to the grieving mom a time or two.”
I ask about Jenkins.
He laughs.
“Bobby Jenkins is a little bitch. He’ll do whatever I tell him to do. Thinks it’s for all the right reasons. I told him we’d teach that little panty-sniffer that justice gets served, no matter what. Also, teach a nosy-ass reporter not to jam up the gears. He never liked you, anyhow.
“And those knuckleheads that jumped you? It’ll keep them from getting an active sentence for some shit they pulled. And they think I had them do it just because I was pissed about a guilty fucker maybe getting to go free.”
I point out that Marie Ducharme didn’t do anything to deserve the grief of losing her only child.
He turns quickly, suddenly angry.
“She married that asshole,” he says. “Don’t tell me she didn’t know something, didn’t know he’d invented his ass whole-cloth over there. She knew he had this mystery mother that they could never visit. She knew there was something, some debt that hadn’t been paid.”
He sighs. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a couple of days.
“Well,” he says, “it’s been paid now.”
He looks around the room.
I ask him if he has something for pain. He looks confused, then remembers my foot.
“Oh, yeah. Well, don’t worry, Mr. Reporter. It won’t hurt much longer.”
Shit.
“I kind of hate to do this. You haven’t really done anything worth getting killed for, just got a little nosy is all. If it makes you feel any better, I’m doing this out of necessity, not spite.”
Before I can come up with some eloquent reason why I should be allowed to keep breathing, he puts the gag back on.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “You won’t feel a thing. Just like the last time.”
He leans closer. I can smell his rancid beer breath.
“Thing is, they might catch me anyhow. I don’t know. But maybe not. I’m betting you’re a close-to-the-vest kind of guy, just waiting to tell all you know. So, if I can make your ass disappear, just like I did Lester Corbett, maybe there’s no one to point fingers. Oh, they’ll suspect, maybe, when they find your car over on Riverside, but they won’t find your body. I just brought yo
u back here to get you all packaged up for your trip down to Surry.”
He confirms what I’ve already figured out. I’m in David Shiflett’s basement, not two blocks from where my mother lives. As my thoughts raced, I noticed the framed picture of his family, the three of them, on the bookshelf across the room. They look happy.
Shiflett explains that he threw me in the police car after he put me out, then backed up to his basement from the alleyway behind his house. He’ll knock me out again, put me back in the car and transfer me to a van parked in a grocery-store lot in eastern Henrico. From there, on to Surry.
“Don’t worry about witnesses,” he says. “Lady on that side, she goes to bed by ten,” he says. “She’s sound asleep by now. The place on the other side, it’s vacant.
“I just wrap you up all neat and tidy in plastic, and take you out, like the trash. I won’t shoot you until we get to the river, but don’t worry, I’ll make sure you’re out when I do it.”
If I could speak, I’d tell him that plenty of people know everything, that they’ll be all over him. But, one, I can’t speak; two, I have kept it pretty much to myself; and, three, I’m not sure David Shiflett really gives a damn anymore. I think maybe part of him wants the papers, all the way up to Boston, Massachusetts, to know exactly what happened to Isabel Ducharme, and why.
Suddenly, Shiflett stops and looks up. He’d had the radio on an oldies station, and now he turns it down a little.
I can hear the floorboards squeaking overhead. Every couple of seconds, I hear it again.
It stops, then starts up again. Shiflett reaches over for the Luger.
He walks over to the steps and starts walking up, his pace as slow as the squeaks we hear upstairs.
Then, the squeaks stop. Shiflett is maybe three steps from the top. He looks slightly puzzled. I guess he figures no one has the guts to invade David Shiflett’s home while he’s in it, even if the door is unlocked.
Except somebody has.
He’s right at the door when he looks back down at me, like he wants to say something.
That’s when the middle of the door explodes and Shiflett goes flying backward. He hits the stairs two or three times and finally comes to rest at my feet.